


listen to the echoes in your haunted house

by scenedenial



Category: Tiny Meat Gang (Band)
Genre: Anxiety, Complex Adult Emotions, Depression, M/M, Questionable Coping Mechanisms, Sexual Content, Suicidal Ideation, cody is sweet and concerned, communication attempts, kissin, me channeling all my emotions thru noel miller? more likely than not, noel’s POV, substance use, this is set during their Fullscreen days
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-15
Updated: 2019-08-15
Packaged: 2020-08-23 18:37:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,308
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20247466
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scenedenial/pseuds/scenedenial
Summary: Cody gets it, sure, but it’s not like hegets itgets it. Because, whatever, when Cody was snorting ketamine and getting blowjobs during his sophomore year at Duke, Noel was stuck in an airless call center, half-dead on Zoloft, idly wondering how he’d off himself if he ever worked up the energy.





	listen to the echoes in your haunted house

**Author's Note:**

> Trigger warning!! This piece deals with depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation. Stay safe!!
> 
> Also, I just wanna say that Noel’s openness about his mental health struggles is super duper meaningful to me and has legitimately had a positive impact on my life during some very dark times. I am using some specific symptoms/etc that Noel has spoken about having in this, but lots of it is embellished, and this is fiction!!!!! Like I said in the tags, this is just a big old vent and has less to do with these actual people and more to do with how comforting they are to me. Anyways, per usual: I love and respect Cody and Noel, don’t show this to them or anyone affiliated with them, thank you for reading :’)

Noel wakes up feeling bad enough that he might as well be dead, and god_damn_ if that shit doesn’t kick a person square in the fucking balls. He rolls over, reaches for his phone in a haze. And there’s Cody onscreen, texts jangling with emojis, exclamation marks. 

Noel throws his phone back down onto the bedside table, disgust hanging heavy on the back of his tongue.

Cody gets it, sure, but it’s not like he _gets it_ gets it. Because, whatever, when Cody was snorting ketamine and getting blowjobs during his sophomore year at Duke, Noel was stuck in an airless call center, half-dead on Zoloft, idly wondering how he’d off himself if he ever worked up the energy.

It’s too late for that now, anyways. Noel might think about it, might roll the idea over in his head, but he knows deep down that if he was ever going to do it, it would have been at twenty under fluorescent, minimum-wage-job lights. He’s made it this far, right? Now to tough it out for the next sixty odd years. And that’s the name of the game called _life_, baby.

Noel’s done this shit for long enough that it ain’t even a _thing_ no more. He drags himself out of bed, a process akin to tasering himself repeatedly in the scrotum, stumbles into the shower. Icy water on his spine jump starts his nervous system better than any goddamn pill. Not that he doesn’t down his candy-heart handful of psychiatrist-prescribed SSRI’s as he stands on the tile floor, hair dripping down the nape of his neck. Yeah, man. Sweet elixir of life. 

He learned a while ago that if you can’t laugh at your own awful ass shit you end up standing on an overpass, waiting for a semi to roar by, or in a padded room without pencils or fingernails. So Noel smiles at himself in the mirror, all teeth. 

“Go get ‘em, tiger.” Noel’s voice sounds echoey and ridiculous, alone in his bathroom. Cody would _jump_ on that positive affirmation shit, probably tweet it and make everyone at Fullscreen like it. It makes Noel want to stick a finger down his throat. 

Noel buys a McDonald’s coffee on his way to work, and after a moment’s hesitation in the drive thru, gets a second for Cody. Caramel flavored, because he’s a dick with awful taste. What’s a dollar in exchange for the way that he knows Cody’s too-bright smile will flash at him like they have a secret? You take that shit where you can get it, and that’s how it is.

—

“Lunch break.” Cody says, poking Noel in the shoulder blade. Noel takes out his earbuds, has to hand it to Cody, because if it wasn’t for him Noel would probably never remember to eat again. 

“What we got?” 

“Pizza.” Cody pulls a face.

“From the shitty cardboard place?” It’s a well known fucking fact that there are only two restaurants worth ordering office lunch from, and the goddamn weak ass pizza joint is _not_ one of them. 

“Let’s just go out, then.” Cody tugs the sleeves down on his self-conscious bomber jacket that it’s slightly too warm to wear out, anyways. 

“Sure.” Noel responds, because what else is he going to do? 

They end up at the corner store with the salad bar; Noel watches Cody heap garbanzo beans and shredded carrots onto a bed of purply lettuce

“Have lunch, man.” Cody chides, and Noel would probably be annoyed if he wasn’t just self aware enough to realize that it’s a fucked up thing to be annoyed by. He concedes, buys a turkey sandwich and a beer. He knows Cody is looking at him, like, _it’s barely noon_. Whatever. Noel isn’t even supposed to drink on his medication, but he gave himself a pass on that one on the grounds of the rule being _impossible to uphold_. It’s all technicality.

“You cool?” Cody asks, finally, after ten minutes of twitching where Noel can tell he’s working himself up. 

“’M cool.” It’s a good answer, even if it isn’t necessarily a _true_ answer. 

He’s grateful as shit when Cody doesn’t push it, just reaches over to filch a sip of beer from Noel’s bottle. 

—

The evenings are the worst. From when Noel unlocks the door to his apartment, shoulders sore from hunching over a keyboard, to when the sun goes down outside his grimy windows, for no discernible reason. Noel prowls his four-room place, as anxious and trapped as a rescue cat, puffing at a joint even though all that shit does is make everything way fucking _worse_. 

He ends up on pornhub—_sexy Asian babe fucks slutty MILF!!_—jerking off halfheartedly, a slow, frustrating means to an end. 

God _damn_, if that’s not the saddest thing in the world. Noel wonders vaguely if there’s any possible way to claw yourself back out of the abyss once you start beating your meat solely as a coping mechanism. 

When Noel is anxious like this he feels it like a weight on his sternum, a weight that he can’t move no matter how hard he strains against it. Breathing is a chore, and isn’t _that_ fucked up? Noel doesn’t true his body to keep him going if he isn’t consciously thinking about each and every inhale. 

He sits on his couch, feeling his heartbeat in all the ligaments of his body. _Jesus._ Sometimes Noel gets so fucking sick of this shit that he would do anything in the world to be rid of it. 

In moments like this, the easy out starts to look pretty goddamn appealing.

Noel’s phone, jutting into his hip from his front pocket, rings. 

He’s so on edge that he starts, standing up off the couch in a rush. When he finally manages to fumble the phone out of his pocket, his hands are shaking badly enough that it slips from his grasp onto the carpeted floor. 

_Get it the fuck together, Miller. Pussy. Fucking bitch._

It’s Cody, the contact photo he set for himself—tongue out, pointer and pinky fingers up—blinking on the screen. Noel answers it and can’t cover the waver in his voice when he says, _yeah, hey, man?_

“Do you...listen, there’s a game on. Wanna come over?” Cody’s voice sounds high and tinny through the phone. Noel feels weak at the knees, spacey like he’s tripping but instead of being high he just feels like absolute motherfucking ass. 

“What—what game?” Noel hopes that Cody can’t hear his heavy, labored breathing over the phone.

“It’s baseball.”

“Baseball fucking sucks.” Noel stares at the baseboard in his living room, counts to five. 

“I know.” There’s a laugh somewhere in Cody’s voice. “But still.”

Noel ties his shoes; somewhere between the stairwell of his apartment complex and the elevator to Cody’s place, his breath begins to come slightly easier. 

—

Noel’s hands end up on Cody before the third inning because of course they do, because this is how they’ve always played it. 

“Shit.” Cody says, and Noel undoes his own jeans.

Roaming, groping hands, the wet heat of Cody’s mouth, a kicked-over beer foaming on the carpet. Noel picks out the details and breathes them in, careful as if he’s constructing a finicky line of code. The gelled slick of Cody’s hair. How pliant he looks with his eyes closed, dark lashes sleeping on his cheeks. The smell of alcohol and melted cheese rising and mingling with the tang of sweat and ardor. The prickle of heat at the center of Noel’s gut. The announcer’s voice on TV, turned down low. _Home run!_

“Ah, dude...” Noel doesn’t _whine_ it, exactly, but the pitch of his voice makes him cringe internally. Goddamn.

Cody looks up at Noel with these big, questioning eyes, but he doesn’t pull off so Noel knows he knows the answer already. 

When Noel comes, Cody grabs his thighs and holds him there. His thumb traces gentle over a scar that mars Noel’s skin, the circular burn of a cigarette. 

—

“You ever think about how you’d kill yourself?” Noel leans against the rail of Cody’s balcony, shirtless and sweaty in the muggy Los Angeles evening. The sky is streaked with a muddled, grayed-out pink. Cody turns to him, face tinted in the sunset cast. His eyebrows are pinched together in the center of his forehead like, _what the fuck is wrong with you_.

“Noel, Jesus. Stop.” 

“I’m just asking.” Noel feels prickly in the dying day. All twisted up and turned out, baby. Cody is all soft and honeyed and fuck, he doesn’t deserve it, does he? 

“Don’t do that.”

“What?” 

“Don’t act like that shit you say doesn’t mean anything.” Cody’s voice sounds thick, watered down anger. 

“Cody...” Noel shrinks into himself like ropes constricting around his insides. “I don’t—I didn’t mean it like _that_, shit.” He scrapes a nail against a front tooth, looks down at his feet. 

“Fuck.” Cody shakes his head, stares out over the city street below. 

“’M sorry.” Noel mutters it more to himself than anything. Cody doesn’t respond. 

—

Noel wakes up facedown in the center of his bed, mouth dry and sour. It’s like fucking _Groundhog Day_, living the same moments over and over, immovable darkness in the back of his head. Noel brushes his teeth, takes his pills. Stares himself down in the bathroom mirror for several long moments.

If there’s something he could say to himself that would help, he can’t think of it. 

—

_hav u thought abt seeing a therapist?_ Noel gets Cody’s text as he sits in gridlocked traffic on his way to work. Closes his eyes and sighs out through his nose.

_I’ve seen plenty._ Cody is well meaning, of course he is, and Noel would be lying if he said that the constant, gentle worry thing didn’t tug at his goddamn _heartstrings_ on occasion. But in moments like this, he wants to turn invisible. To fade away, change jobs and cities, have everyone who looks at his see nothing beyond his face. 

_but i mean like consistently_  
every week or smth  
my buddy knows a girl who’s rly good 

Noel isn’t interested in Cody’s frat boy friends weighing in on his shit. He isn’t interested in any of this. 

—

Noel is drunk, leaning hard on Cody’s shoulder as they leave the function. A night of shaking hands and kissing up to executives, Noel standing silently behind Cody as he _mingled_ like some yuppie at a luncheon, making Fullscreen look good. And, first of all, who the fuck gets wasted at a Thursday night work mixer? Noel, apparently. 

“C’mon, there’s a curb. Step up.” Cody hooks an arm around Noel’s waist and acts as a replacement for his useless, gummed up motor skills. 

“I’m tired.” Noel’s eyelids feel heavy and sticky each time he blinks.

“Yeah, me too.” Cody says, and Noel is too out of it to catch whether or not he’s annoyed. Noel would be, if the roles were reversed. But Cody always was better than him. “We’re almost to the car.” 

Noel sits in the passenger seat, knees tucked up to his chest, and watches the streetlights blur by. It’s getting late.

“I’m scared that nothing’s gonna change.” He blurts eventually, walls lowered and impulses boosted by too-strong cocktails at the free bar. When he looks over at Cody, he sees how sad his eyes look in the reflections off the dashboard. 

“What do you mean?” Cody asks, and it’s so gentle, far more gentle than what Noel deserves. 

“I don’t want to—I don’t wanna fucking feel like this forever.”

“You won’t.” Cody says, and Noel might believe him if his voice didn’t crack on the second word. “Come on, man.”

“How do you know?” Noel leans his head against the cool glass of the window. He wants to lay still and watch the ticking of the second hand on a clock. Just to know that time is still passing. 

“I mean... things always get better, right?” Cody swallows audibly. “Like, you were working at that shitty call center forever and now you’re here, and that has to prove something, yeah?” 

“It does?” Noel can taste liquor on his gums. His head pounds. 

“Yeah.” Cody nods, and in the thin slant of the streetlights, it looks as if he’s trying to convince himself as much as anything. “It’ll be fine, okay? Seriously.” 

“What if—” Noel is spiraling now, unable to stop the flow of fearful, drunken thoughts as they travel from his dumbass brain to his dumbass mouth, “what if I’m alone forever, though?”

There’s a silence in the car that feels heavy, sludgy, like something that’s difficult to breathe through. Noel sees Cody’s hands tighten on the steering wheel, white-knuckling it. A horn honks in the distance.

“Shut up, Noel.” Cody says, and his voice is so subdued that Noel barely hears it. 

“What?” 

Cody doesn’t speak. Noel doesn’t process that he’s pulling the car off on the shoulder until it grinds to a stop. Cody turns in his seat to look at Noel, his face this perfect, heartbreaking caricature of hurt. 

“Are you kidding?” There’s a bite in Cody’s voice now that Noel has hardly heard before, not even that time at work when his software crashed and he lost seven hours worth of code. It scares Noel, makes his chest ache indistinctly. 

“Dude, I don’t—” Noel wishes he wasn’t half-slurring his words right now. 

“You’re so stupid, man. You think you’re _alone_?” Noel is slowly, slowly understanding that look on his face. All raw and opened-up. Fuck. “What about your parents? Taylor? What about _me_, asshole?” 

“That’s not what I meant.” Noel says to his lap, but, shit, what _does_ he mean? The taillights of the cars that speed past them are blurring and washing together through the smeared windows. 

“You spend all this time throwing a goddamn pity party because you don’t—you don’t think anyone _loves_ you or whatever the fuck, but, Jesus, if you would look at anything else for a second you’d see—” Cody breaks off and when Noel looks up at him, he sees that his eyes are glassed over and overly bright in the thrown light. 

Fuck, fuck, fuck. 

Noel feels like he might vomit, right here in the car Cody saved for, the one he stood beside, grinning with pride like a kid, as Noel snapped a picture. 

A tear falls down Cody’s face and Noel sees it trace a wet path over his cheekbone before Cody swipes at it with the back of his hand. Cody is a crier—romantic movies, rescued animal videos, Facebook posts about returning soldiers—but this, here, makes Noel feel so shitty that he wants to separate his skin from his bones. 

“Hey,” Noel tries, even though he’s so achingly tired that he feels sick with it, “I’m sorry, okay?”

“I just don’t think you get it.” Cody says, and his voice is all mucked up and slushy with emotion.

“Don’t get what?” Nausea is pushing its way up Noel’s throat. He wishes he could close his eyes and forget. 

“I’m trying to tell you that I love you, asshole.” Cody drops his head back against the car seat headrest. Noel can see tears glimmering at Cody’s eyelashes. He feels weightless and short of breath. 

“I—” Noel says. Cody pushes the car into gear and steers back onto the rushing, impersonal road. 

—

“Okay.” Cody says when the car pulls to a stop in front of Noel’s apartment complex. “See you at work, then.” His voice isn’t biting but Noel almost wishes it was. Wishes Cody had forced him out of the car onto the highway. Wishes Cody would pin him up by his wrists to be stripped and whipped like Christ on the cross, to live and die by the _hand_, baby, amen. 

It’s harder when Cody pretends like nothing is wrong.

Noel stumbles up the stairs to his place, legs wobbly and vision doubling and tripling under the harsh fluorescent lights. 

In his bedroom, he strips off his belt and jeans, lets them fall in a pile to the floor. His eyes look bloodshot and cratered in the bathroom mirror. His phone sits on the counter and he knows he should dial Cody’s number and say it back. _Cody Kolodziejzyk, can you ever forgive me?_

Instead, Noel gets in bed and pulls the covers to his ears, passes out without setting an alarm.

—

Noel is two hours late to work in the morning, which isn’t something he _does_, and he can feel Cody’s gaze boring into his back as he takes the walk of shame to his cubicle. He’s hungover and slow-moving, his whole body aching like he took a hit, and another. 

He feels so bad that it’s like someone’s taken a power drill to the back of his brain, stripping him of everything he is and the ability to feel warmth. He sits at his computer without logging in for a stretch of time that feels endless. 

An e-mail pings onto the screen.

_Sender: Cody Kolodziejzyk_  
Subject: ;(  
Can we talk @ lunch?? U look like shit. I’m sorry about the things I said last night.  
-c 

Noel sighs and pinches at the bridge of his nose. Cody is the one to remedy things, the one to reach out, to apologize, to smooth the surface over like icing on a cake. He’s good at it. Noel doesn’t understand him.

—

“Where were you this morning?” Cody shoves his hands into the pockets of his jacket. They’re standing behind the building, Noel leaning up against graffitied brick. Noel unwraps a stick of gum for something to do with his hands.

“Overslept. I’m hungover.” Cody lets out a short laugh.

“Unsurprising.” He kicks at the ground with the toe of his sneaker, dislodges a pebble and sends it skittering across the concrete. “Listen, Noel, I just wanted to say that I came on too strong last night, and—you know, it wasn’t cool. So I’m sorry.” 

Noel breathes out like he’s exhaling smoke. Part of him, the sadistic part, wants to grab Cody by the face and force him to his knees. The rest of him just wants to sag into his warm shoulder. 

“You don’t have to say that. You were just calling me out for my bullshit. It was totally fair, man.” Noel has never been one for _communicating_ like this. It puts him on edge; no matter how much Cody loves to _talk things out_, Noel isn’t used to it and probably never will be. Twenty odd years of emotional repression will _do_ that to a person, man.

“But I...” Cody shifts, looks at Noel with this expression on his face, “I know you’re going through some shit, so I should be, like...better.”

“No, no, you shouldn’t have to just _take_ my asshole behavior. And I, I mean, I’m sorry too. For being an asshole.” Noel knows his face is flushing. Goddamn. He’s so, so tired. And now, like nearly always, he thinks Cody would be better off if he just faded out of existence entirely. 

But then Cody is leaning into him in this soft, unmistakable way, and Noel’s lips meet his by way of muscle memory. 

“It’s alright.” Cody murmurs. Noel puts a hand on his ribcage and pulls him closer. Cody tastes like decaf coffee and the chocolates that sit in that jar in the pantry, and he’s the only fucking thing that silences the chainsaw buzzing inside Noel’s skull. 

Noel feels Cody’s breath hot on the side of his face when he leans down to kiss him on the neck.

“You’ll be okay, Noel.” Cody’s voice is a whisper, his hands ghosting over Noel’s chest, his shoulders. “I know it.”

Noel tries so hard to believe him.

**Author's Note:**

> My discord is scenedenial#8297 if u wanna come holler at me abt Noel Miller or smth


End file.
